The Night Falconer

by Andy Straka

  She and Nicole exchanged handshakes and hugs as well. Nicole was smiling.

  “You two have any checked bags?”

  “Nope,” I said. “This is it.”

  Nicole carried her laptop case and roll-on suitcase. I was wearing my sport coat, so all I toted was a shoulder bag. In Virginia, of course, we might’ve also toted our legally concealed handguns, but not here in the litigation and gun control happy Big Apple. I didn’t figure we’d need them. And if it turned out we did, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find whatever was required.

  “Good,” Darla said. “My car’s right out back of the terminal here. Not too far at all. One of the bennies of being ex-Port Authority.”

  She nodded and gave a wave to the screeners, then turned to the side to pull open a large metal door emblazoned with the words Authorized Personnel Only. We followed her through the opening and began to descend a flight of stairs.

  “Where are we headed?” Nicole asked.

  “Thought we’d stop someplace and grab a cup of coffee before I take you across the river to meet Dr. Lonigan.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She cupped her hand to her mouth and stifled a yawn. “I need something to get my motor started this morning.”

  “Late night?”

  She nodded. “Decided to try some surveillance in the park.”

  “Central Park?”

  “Where else?”

  “Trying to catch this guy with the owl.”

  “You got it. Which—me being clueless about the bird thing—makes me glad you two are here.”

  We were at the bottom of the steps at a junction with more doors and an entrance to a tunnel that seemed to run between the terminals. We started down the tunnel. Long fluorescent fixtures ran the length of it. The floor was smooth cement and the walls were made of concrete block. A couple of guys wearing airline maintenance uniforms approached and passed us, headed in the opposite direction. They didn’t even give us a second glance.

  “Looks like you’re pretty well known around here,” I said.

  “You might say that.”

  “How long have you been looking for these missing pets?”

  “Couple of days is all. And with other business, I haven’t had much time to spend on this.”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. Like I told Dr. Lonigan, I’m for sure gonna catch this idiot with the bird, whoever he is. But when I told her about you, Franco, she thought maybe you could help speed up the process.”

  “I take it money’s not an issue with this client.”

  She offered me fish eyes. “You really never heard of this building where she’s living?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t get out much anymore, do you?”

  “Not to Manhattan anyway.” Maybe that would change once Marcia and I were married. I pictured taking her on a romantic weekend to the city. Broadway show. Carriage ride. Lunch at Tavern on the Green. Expensive, but it would be worth it.

  Darla grunted an affirmation.

  “I read about the Grayland Towner renovation in an architecture course I audited my last semester,” Nicole said. “Art deco preservation with a modern twist.”

  “Now here’s a woman who’s up to speed.” Darla smiled.

  “Modern twist, huh?” I said.

  Nicole shrugged.

  “You agree with Lonigan then?” I asked Darla. “You like the developer for whatever’s going on with her cat and these other pets?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused for a moment. “I managed to get in to see the man, but didn’t get very far with him.”

  “He hiding something?”

  “Could be. He’s no rosy, cooperative type, I’ll tell you that.”

  “What about the other pet owners? You think they’re playing straight?”

  “Far as I can tell. I haven’t had a chance to talk to most of them yet.”

  “It still seems like a lot of trouble to go through, putting all of us to work on this, don’t you think?” Nicole said.

  “Probably,” Darla said. “But hey, if it was one of your precious falcons or whatever missing like that, you’d be going all out too, wouldn’t you?”

  Nicole looked at me and nodded. Hard to disagree with that.

  “So Lonigan strikes you as a straight shooter,” I said.

  “Absolutely. And besides,” Darla said. “There’s been some creepy stuff going on with this whole deal.”

  “What do you mean, creepy stuff?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it when I get my hands on that coffee,” she said.

  We’d come to another junction with multiple doors and a new flight of stairs. After climbing the steps, she led us through another door, this time back outdoors.

  The morning air shook with the roar of an airliner taking off on a nearby runway. It didn’t feel much cooler than Virginia. The slight breeze off the bay was already full of humidity and the smell of jet fuel. A late model Dodge minivan with New York plates stood parked on the blacktop between the terminal wall and a row of maintenance vehicles.

  “Your van?” Nicole asked.

  “I’ve got three kids. Two still in school,” Darla explained as we approached the vehicle.

  Her gaze locked on something in front of us for a moment.

  “Hold up,” she said, pulling up short and reaching out her big paw to block us from passing. We stopped in our tracks. I followed Darla’s line of sight through the glass into the back seat of the van. “Weird … Don’t touch anything.”

  “What is it?” Nicole asked.

  “Wait one second,” I whispered. “Don’t move.”

  Darla reached inside the jacket of her pantsuit, came out with a mini-Glock, and flipped off the safety. She pointed the gun at the van with both hands, knees flexed in a shooter’s position as she made a slow shuffling circle around the vehicle, taking her time. Finally, she ended up back next to us, her lip quivering a little but her fingers gripped around the Glock as firm as stone.

  “Okay. Clear,” she said.

  “What’s gong on?” Nicole wanted to know.

  Darla didn’t answer. She re-holstered and secured her gun, then out whipped out her cell phone, and punched in a number.

  “That’s what’s going on,” I said, pointing toward the back of the Dodge.

  A child’s booster seat was strapped into one of the captains chairs in back. Which wasn’t an unusual sight for such a van. What was unusual was the shape of the K-bar knife someone had plunged into the base of the child’s seat, the exposed portion of its serrated blade winking out at us like a set of jagged teeth.

  Something moved in the corner of my eye. A door in the terminal wall behind one of the other vehicles was closing softly.

  “Hey!”

  I dropped my bag and sprinted toward the gap. Managed to get there just before the door shut and flung it open with a bang against the outside wall. Footsteps pounding down metal stairs, flash of green, a dark shape moving below. Nicole behind me yelling.

  I leapt down the first short flight of steps and landed with a hollow crash against a metal screen wall. Kept going.

  Vapor rose from somewhere. Gargantuan air conditioning units pounding. The stairs terminated in the middle of a dim tunnel. Had the runner gone left or right? I waited, listening. Nothing—impossible to tell.

  Behind me, Nicole and Darla thumped down the steps, Nicole hauling both our bags, Darla with her gun drawn again.

  “You see anybody?” Darla asked.

  “Not really. Just a glimpse,” I said.

  “Is this the kind of creepy stuff you were talking about?” Nicole asked.

  Darla nodded, looking at me. “Welcome to the big apple again, Franco,” she said.

  Back beside the van, I moved carefully around the side to have a better look at the damage with Nicole looking over my shoulder. Darla positioned herself in front of the vehicle, her phone welded to her ear and cursing under her breath, talking to someone
from the airport police.

  The entire glass panel from the Dodge’s rear sliding door had been shattered. This was no routine smash and grab, where thieves went after the stereo or anything else of value. Even though there was no security on the private lot, someone had gone to great lengths to pull this off in broad daylight, not to mention the strength required to drive the blade so deeply into the seat.

  Darla finished talking on the phone and stepped around to join us. I stared with her into the back seat at the image of the blade buried in the Graco Turbobooster.

  “Looks like you’ve got yourself some nasty new friends, Darla.”

  “Shoot. More like the Terminator on speed, you ask me. Cops’ll be down here in a minute.”

  “They catch anything on their surveillance system?”

  “There’s no camera on these parking spaces.”

  “Figures. Our Terminator must have known that too.”

  “Yup. My guess is, it was someone posing as a baggage handler or a maintenance worker.”

  “Remind me not to hang with you next time I fly.”

  “I guess I should’ve said something to you folks earlier about the threat.” Darla shielded her eyes and looked past me into the glare of the early morning sun as a LaGuardia patrol car, its beacons spinning, whipped into the lot.

  “Threat?” I said. “What threat?”

  4

  Half an hour later, after working through the intricacies of dealing with the airport cops and Darla’s insurance company, Nicole and I were standing by a rental car counter with Darla, waiting for the agent to process the paperwork on the new van Darla had rented.

  The knife was being checked for prints and any other trace evidence, and so was the Dodge, before they towed it to a body shop. The cops were treating the incident as a routine B&E, figuring we’d been lucky to scare away the person responsible. The knife was simply the idiot’s twisted calling card, left when he realized he’d have to bolt empty handed. If Darla weren’t ex NYPD and who she was, they would simply have written up their report and wouldn’t even have messed with the van any further.

  “I’m sorry you two had to walk right into this mess,” Darla said.

  “No apology needed,” I said.

  “Mmmmm.”

  I was beginning to wonder what else she might not be telling us as she took the keys and the paperwork from the agent. I knew I could trust her with my back, but not if we were only dealing in partial truths. There was a bench outside on the curb where the three of us sat down to wait for the rental car shuttle.

  “You said something earlier about a threat,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s like this. Yesterday, I got a message on my service. A voice says to stay away from the cat thing with Dr. Lonigan or there might be consequences. That was the word they used—consequences.”

  “All right. So?”

  She reached inside her jacket pocket and pulled out a folded slip of white paper. “So—when I was pulling my stuff out of the van before leaving the lot with you all, I found this under the front seat. Perp you chased must have dropped it. Probably got wind of us coming and had to bug out in a hurry.”

  She handed the paper to me and I unfolded it. In bold black magic marker someone had written out the word CONSAQUENSES. I showed it to Nicole.

  “Butchered the spelling,” Nicole said. “Your caller specifically named Lonigan?”

  “Uh-huh,” Darla said.

  “Was the voice male or female?” I asked.

  “Male—definitely male. Had some kind of accent too, but I couldn’t really tell what kind.”

  I looked across at Nicole then back at Darla. “Is there some reason you didn’t tell me about this before offering me the job?”

  “No. I should have.”

  “You try to trace the call?”

  “Tried to, but it turns out they were using a stolen wireless phone from an international carrier.”

  “Where?”

  “Africa. The Sudan.”

  “Pretty volatile place.”

  “I didn’t even know they had cell phone service in places like Sudan.” Nicole said.

  Darla turned toward my daughter. “Learn something every day. There ain’t many countries left on this planet don’t have some kind of cellular.”

  “Hey, Dad. Sudan’s next to Egypt, isn’t it? Isn’t Dominick Watisi Egyptian?”

  “Egyptian-American,” I corrected. The info Nicole had dug up online the night before about the prolific developer showed that he’d actually been an American citizen for most of his life. He’d emigrated from Egypt with his parents when he was eight years old.

  “Yeah, but he could still have some ties there. Maybe he even does business over there.”

  I glanced hopefully at Darla.

  The big woman shrugged. “He could be doing business overseas. Watisi’s about as red-blooded American as they come. Man keeps a giant American flag in the corner of his office. Got a framed picture on the wall of himself shaking hands with President Bush.”

  “Sounds like a politician,” Nicole said.

  “No, just a businessman.”

  “One who’s not very cooperative when it comes to talking to private investigators,” I added.

  “There is that.”

  “Okay, he’s visit numero uno after we meet and greet with the good doctor. How are we going to get around, by the way, if you’re not with us all the time?”

  “Oh, I almost forgot. Dr. Lonigan said you can use her car. She keeps it garaged and hardly ever drives it. A Porsche, I think.”

  “Cool,” Nicole muttered under her breath.

  “So we can be inconspicuous,” I said.

  “What, you’d rather take the subway?”

  “Depending on where we’re going, yes. But we’re not looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “That would be my advice,” Darla said.

  “Hey, I know. We can make what just happened work in our favor, let whoever did the knife work think they’ve scared you off the case,” Nicole suggested.

  “Not a bad idea,” Darla said. “But you’re forgetting one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t make threats against me or my kids and expect me to just go away and stop paying attention.”

  “And if they—whoever they is—are paying any attention at all, they’re going to figure out we’re working with you,” I said. “Which means the threat will be coming down on us next.”

  Verbalizing it made me second guess my insisting that Nicole accompany me on the trip. I glanced at her, but not too long for fear that Darla might pick up my apprehension.

  “You two didn’t bring any personal firearms, I take it,” Darla said.

  I shook my head. “Didn’t think we’d have the need.”

  “Have to see about remedying that.”

  “What’s the word on Watisi? He been known to use strong-arm tactics before?”

  “Not for public consumption at least. But like almost any big developer in this town, I’ve heard some rumblings. Maybe it’s part of the cost of doing business.”

  The rental car shuttle arrived. We climbed aboard and took seats in the back. Fortunately, we were the only riders at the moment. I looked at Darla, whose expression carried a weary glaze. Neither one of us was the eager beaver cop we once were.

  “You must have rattled Watisi’s cage when you tried to talk with him yesterday,” I said.

  “I suppose.”

  “Anything else about him suspicious?”

  “Just that he’s a big game hunter. You should see the trophies mounted on his wall.”

  “May not be anything wrong with that.”

  “Maybe not. But what if the man hates cats?”

  “The man hates cats?”

  “That’s what his wife let slip—she’s his secretary—when I asked about the stuffed lion and tiger heads he’s got in his office.”

  “Maybe we should check his taxidermist for Gr
oucho.”

  “Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be so easy to pin this rap on him.”

  “So I take it your stakeout in the park last night was a waste of time.”

  “Pretty much. I sat watching both the building and the park across the street for more than five hours. Seen the usual—homeless types, teenaged hookers, young folks sneaking off together into the woods to do whatever. Bunches of bats. Even a few pigeons.”

  “But no owls. And no mysterious man wearing a big glove around either.”

  “Right. But don’t forget. We’ve got people saying they’ve seen this dude with the bird. I figured it was worth a shot.”

  “Did you call and talk to Dr. Lonigan while we standing around dealing with the cops?”

  “Yes.”

  “You tell her why we were running late?”

  “I just said there’d been some complications and I’d explain when we got there. She said she’d wait for us. Already did her weekend rounds at the hospital.”

  “Early riser.”

  “I don’t know if the woman ever sleeps.”

  “Tell me some more about your kids.”

  “Sweetness is five and in kindergarten. Cute as a button. That’s her booster seat in the van. My middle boy Marco is nine. The quiet type, but sharp. Doesn’t miss a trick.

  “You must be proud.”

  “I am.”

  “They well protected?”

  “They will be now. First thing when I get home, I’m shipping them out to stay with my sister in Pennsylvania.”

  “Depending on how our meeting goes with Watisi, I’d like to start looking more deeply into his affairs.”

  “Go for it. One thing I haven’t had time to do yet is follow the money trail,” Darla said. “Could be some kind of connection between Watisi’s dispute with Dr. Lonigan and some of his other developments.”

  “I thought we already knew that,” Nicole said. “Isn’t there a public referendum or something coming up?”

  Darla said, “There is, but developers like Watisi get into disputes all the time with their tenants. That wouldn’t be enough for Watisi to risk causing a stir by killing a bunch of pets.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Unless you’re trying to keep a really low profile because you’ve got something to hide and you don’t like all the publicity the dispute with Lonigan and the other tenants is raising …”